The sidebar of the Preview can be toggled with the menu View --> Sidebar or with the shortcut N. You can select one of three tabs: Tool, View or Metadata. Figure 1 shows the side bar of the Preview, but also the side bar of the sequencer. In the Preview side bar, the View tab is activated and all panels are expanded. The Safe Areas are enabled and an Annotation is added.
Reference
| Name: | View Settings |
| Context: | Video Sequence Editor > Preview |
| Location: | Sidebar > View |
- Proxy Render Size
The use of proxies is fully described in section
Setup </video_editing/setup/proxies>. Prefetching frames is described in the section about cache.- Channel
The Sequencer can contain multiple channels. Figure 1 has three channels with strips: a Sound strip at channel 1, a Movie strip at channel 2 and a Scene strip at channel 3. The channel that is shown in the preview, is indicated here. You can get a similar result by Muting strips above the indicated channel. Channel 0 (default setting) is the compositing result of all strips and is shown by default.
Note
This option should not be interpreted as some kind of "isolation mode". The indicated channel is not isolated in the sense that only that channel is shown. Each channel is implicitly composited on top of the channel(s) below. A better description could be "show up to channel".
- Show Overexposed
Shows overexposed (bright) areas using a zebra pattern. When is an area overexposed? You can set the threshold with the slider. The values 0 - 110 should be interpreted as a percentage of decimal value (0 - 1.1). Whenever the RGB value (any component) of a pixel is greater or equal to the specified threshold, it will be marked (zebra-striped) as overexposed. You can check this easily with a color strip. Set the color for example to bright yellow (RGB = 0.9, 0.9, 0). When the threshold is set to 90, everything will be zebra-striped (supposedly overexposed). From threshold value 91 on, the preview shows a bright yellow color again. A threshold of 0 will disable this filter.
Note
The following Overlays (Frame Overlay, Safe Area, Annotations, and Metadata) can be made visible with the Show Overlay button (top right of the Preview window).
Reference
| Name: | Frame Overlay |
| Context: | Video Sequence Editor > Preview |
| Location: | Sidebar > View |
By enabling this Frame Overlay setting, you can compare the current frame to a reference frame. This is very handy, for example in color grading. You can have the preview of two shots on the screen so that it is easier to match the colors of two shots. Also in multicam editing where you have shots of the same scene from different cameras, it can come handy to have a preview of both cameras at the same time.
The User Interface of this option is however a bit rusty.
- Set Overlay region
You have to set the Frame Offset (see below) first; otherwise you want see much happening. Pressing the Set Overlay Region button lets you draw a box where you want the Overlay to appear in the Preview. The shortcut is
O. In figure 3, an Overlay Region is drawn at the left side of the Preview.This Overlay type (Rectangle) is however not that useful. Suppose, you want to see the mid-region of the reference frame. Therefore, you need to draw a box at the mid-region of the current frame, hiding probably some vital info. Drawing it at the top will move it out of the way but will probably show also the less interesting area (top) from the reference frame.
- Frame Offset
This slider controls the offset of the reference frame relative to current frame. In figure 3, the current frame is at position 7650 and the reference frame at position 6650 (dashed blue line), which is an offset of -1000 frames from the current frame. Changing the Frame Offset will not update in real time the Preview window. To see the result of this change, you have to move the playhead.
- Overlay Type
- Rectangle
A rectangle area of the reference frame will be displayed on top of current frame at the same position. This is the case used in figure 3 (right handside).
- Reference
Only the reference frame is displayed in the preview region (see figure 3, left handside). Of course, this is exactly the same as moving the current frame and switching off the frame overlay.
- Current
Only the current frame is displayed in the preview region (figure 3, mid section). This is, of course, the default behavior of the Preview.
Tip
The last two options are only useful when working with two preview windows.It is possible to have several Sequence Editors opened at the same time and they can use different overlay types. So, the middle sequence editor displays the Current frame, while the left editor displays the Reference frame.
- Overlay Lock
The reference frame is moved in sync with the current frame. With this option, you can (temporary) lock the reference frame to its current position.
Reference
| Name: | Safe Areas |
| Context: | Video Sequence Editor > Preview |
| Location: | Sidebar > View |
A safe area is a screen area that is visible on most devices. Especially, older TV's with rounded corners have a much smaller visible area. This safe area is indicated in Blender by dashed lines (see figure 5) and conform to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) rules. There are two areas:
- Title Safe Margins X & Y
According to the EBU document (where this option is called "Graphics Safe Area"), this is set by default to 5% of the project resolution. All text and graphic elements such as subtitles or a logo must be placed within this area.
- Action Safe Margins X & Y
All major action should be viewable within this area. By default, the Action Safe Margins are set to 3.5% of the the project resolution. The Action Safe Margins are smaller than the Title Safe Margins because loosing some text (or logo) is more harmful than cutting some action.
- Center-Cut Safe Areas
This ensures that people who still have old 4×3 TVs or monitors won’t have the text cut off on the sides. By default, this is set to 17.5% of the X project resolution and 5% of the Y axis. Of course, these values are for a 16:9 aspect ratio project. If you want to display a 16:9 image in a 4:3 area, there are two possibilities (see figure 6).
In the left solution of figure 6, the complete 16:9 image is preserved but two black rectangular areas (called letterboxes) are added to the top and bottom. If you want to completely fill the 4:3 area with footage, you need the solution at the right of figure 6. The original 16:9 image is cropped 12.5%, both left and right. Add another 5% for the Title Safe Area and you'll get the default 17.5%.
Note
Modern TV's and computer monitors have fixed pixel matrix screens and the viewable area is much larger than older CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) screens. So, the safe areas are not that important anymore. However, users are accustomed with the safe area layout. So, following the safe area guides is good practice. Also, from an aesthetic view point it is not advisable to stick text or logos to the very edge of the screen.
Reference
| Name: | Scene Strip Display |
| Context: | Video Sequence Editor > Preview |
| Location: | Sidebar > View |
With this option, you can control how the images of Scene Strips are displayed in the preview. In figure 1, a scene strip was added to display the orange circle at the left of the intro text. This orange circle was created in the 3D view of another scene; you cannot use the same scene of the sequencer. It's a simple mesh with an orange emission material applied to it.
- Shading
Shading refers to the way objects are drawn and lit in the Preview. More info can be found at Viewport Shading
- Solid: shows the objects from the scene strip as massive objects but without any materials assigned. The lightning, colors and other options could be set in the Workbench Render Engine (Properties > Render Tab > Render Engine).
- Wireframe: Does not seem to work!
- Material Preview: Renders the scene strip with the Eevee render engine, independent of the render engine that was selected in the scene itself.
- Rendered: Render the scene strip with the chosen scene Render Engine (Cycles, Eevee, Workbench). By default the scene lights are used for lighting.
Figure 5: Scene Strip Display (Solid, Material Preview, Rendered); see also figure 1.
Note that the image in the Rendered view is slightly different because it is rendered with the render engine of the source scene, which was set to Cycles.
- Override Scene Settings
This option is only available, if Solid shading is activated. When enabled, it uses the Workbench render settings from the sequencer scene, not the Workbench render settings from the source scene. You can find these settings in the Properties > Render tab > Render Engine.
Reference
| Name: | Annotations |
| Context: | Video Sequence Editor > Preview |
| Location: | Sidebar > View |
- Annotations
With this panel, you can change the appearance of the Annotations that were made in the Preview. More info can be found in the User Interface section. Using the Annotate tool (in the 3D viewport) is explained in detail in the tutorial by 3DGreenhorn.
To create an Annotation, you have to select the Annotate tool in the
Toolbar <toolbar>(shortcutD) and start drawing. A new data-block is created and made visible in the Annotate panel of the side bar, called "Annotations" in figure 6. You can create multiple data-blocks (e.g. Annotations.001, Annotations.002, ... with the Add New button (see figure 6) or change to another data-block with the drop-down at the left of the header. All newly added annotations in the Preview are stored within the selected data-block. You can only display the annotations of one data-block at a time. To remove an Annotations data-block, click the Unlink button. That data-block however is not deleted at once (so you can recover it with the drop-down) but is deleted when the Blend-file is saved (unless the Fake User button is enabled).Within a data-block , there can be multiple layers. The default name of a layer is "note". You can create multiple layers (e.g. note.001, ...) with the Add New Annotation Layer button (+); for example if you want to use different colors. To remove a layer, click (-). To make a layer invisible in Preview, click the Hide button (eye). One layer can contain multiple annotations. They can be drawn in the Preview at the same frame or at different frames. The color of the annotations is set per layer with the Color picker (at the left of the Note). Also, the Opacity and Thickness are set per layer.
An annotation, drawn in the Preview, is visible at the frame that it is drawn and stays visible until the next frame with an annotation. So, if you have two consecutive annotations (eg. at frame 10 and 11); the first annotation will only be visible for one frame (eg. frame 10), while the second annotation will stay visible (frame 11 to ...). With the Lock Current Frame button, you will freeze the annotations of that specific frame, regardless of previous and later annotations.
- Onion Skinning
With Onion Skinning, you can make the previous and later annotations of the current frame visible. They appear in the selected colors for a number of frames (Before and After). Setting the Before and After value to zero will show the annotations one frame before and one frame after the current frame. Setting it to a higher number will show them for a longer period before and after. Setting these values to -1 will disable the Onion Skinning in that direction.
- Metadata
A movie or image strip can contain, in addition to the actual image, some metadata such as the file name, the date created, the camera model, ... Some of this metadata can be made visible in the Preview (see Show Overlay button). The metadata that is shown however is from the strip under the playhead, not the active (selected) strip in the sequencer.
The metadata from a Blender output render is stored in the appropriate fields (camera, time, ...; see Rendered Output. Some graphic programs such as Gimp also store some metadata. However, only the text stored in the header field "Comments" is displayed in the Preview and shown in the metadata panel. You cannot edit this value from within Blender. For that, you need an external program such as exiftool.
The command to change the Comments field is:
exiftool --comments="My new comment" name-of-file.png
Note
The metadata will only be displayed for the image, that has not been processed by any effect. For example, adding an effect strip (eg. Glow) will hide the metadata from view. Of course, the metadata isn't removed from the file. Hiding the effect strip will display it again.